"I’ve never heard of it." — Chris Sabo (January 17, 2014)

San Francisco Bay Blues

Edinson Volquez was all kinds of nasty last night. And by nasty I mean sucky. My phone was blowing up last night with ESPN Alerts — for all the wrong reasons (much like it was when Cueto last pitched).

39 pitches, 5 hits, 5 ERs, 3 BBs, 0.2 inning

It doesn’t get much uglier than that, folks.

Not that it mattered, but Logan Ondrusek didn’t help much either (1.0 inning, 4 ERs).

This Reds team is good, but not good enough to continually overcome large deficits early in the game. Especially against teams like the Giants. It’s games like last night that make me grateful the Reds were able to build up a sizable lead in the NL Central last week.

By the way, that sizable lead the Reds had has already been cut in half.

On-and-off paying attention to the second drubbing in a row at the hands of the Giants and not going to wait for your post about that loss. Unfortunately these two games with SF, along with the Cardinals series a couple weeks ago, help to prove that this team has gotten a fat record from beating up on the Pirates, Cubs, Brewers, etc, but when they play good teams they just get shot down. Out of curiousity, I checked the records and the Reds are currently 12-24 against the other top teams of the NL (5-10 against the Cards of course, plus 7-14 against the Giants, Phillies, Padres and Braves)

Aside from being extremely aggravating as a Reds fan, it also gives me little confidence that the Reds will hang around in October for very long if they should make the playoffs in the first place.

If the Reds make it to the playoffs and they face a solid one-two front of the rotation (which they certainly will in the playoffs), they are in big, big trouble. This team just don’t have any stoppers or pitchers that I trust 100% to stop the bleeding.

Hi, Sabo’s Goggles. I agree. That one-two punch, as you put it, is always a key element for teams in the playoff hunt, i.e. Atlanta, San Diego, St.Louis, perhaps the Phils and, yes, San Fran. They all have that key potential force in the starting rotation. The Reds have a little more meat on the bone (throughout the whole pitching staff) than you might think, however. This team isn’t just talented, but it also has a great chemistry between young and old players. That translates into good team communication, thus, on average, individual learning curves increase. Which also usually indicates how it’s possible that different players seem to come through in the clutch (all positions, offense, defense and other roles included).

Of course, the unpredictability of this team is slightly higher than one would want, but they’re basically a young (with well above avg. talent throughout) team. That’s to be expected, especially in this first sort of foundation level year, as I previously mentioned.

All in all, I believe Cincy can play with the best of ’em. And I’m certainly not closed off to the potential level that our pitching staff can rise to. But I respect your general hesitancy here. The Reds have spun their wheels wayyyy too long when it comes to getting on to the business of rooting for another winning Cincinnati Reds team, no question!